I'm a fan of declarative programming (look at how many SQL questions I answer), but the IoC containers I've looked at seem too arcane for their own good.
...or perhaps the developers of IoC containers are incapable of writing clear documentation.
...or else both are true to one degree or another.
I don't think the concept of an IoC container is bad. But the implementation has to be both powerful (that is, flexible) enough to be useful in a wide variety of applications, yet simple and easily understood.
It's probably six of one and half a dozen of the other. A real application (not a toy or demo) is bound to be complex, accounting for many corner cases and exceptions-to-the-rules. Either you encapsulate that complexity in imperative code, or else in declarative code. But you have to represent it somewhere.
